Percyness quality guidelines.

[icarus]

Over the last several months I've received stories at Percyness: The Percy Weasley Archive that were of questionable quality.

Many of them were completely unbeta'd and written with the care you'd put into sketching a fic on the back of a cocktail napkin. Some had formatting so strange the story was unreadable. I'm not speaking to the person who uploaded their story as a solid block of text.

I've struggled with some truly bad poetry. Other stories were borderline. They seemed to be beta'd, but consisted of minimalist verbal tags floating in a sea of nothing, or epithets overused to a point that it seemed dozens of people occupied the bed and not just two. There were excellent characterisations of Percy with all other characters as cardboard cut-outs dancing around him.

It has stretched my original policy of "accept everything if it's at least beta'd" to the breaking point.

I didn't want to be the arbiter of taste. But neither do I want to host an archive of stories no one would want to read. Where does one draw the line?

What do you think? What do you want in an archive?

[Poll #695887]

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

because it is a good collection of stories that, even though I've read them, are still better than most you would find elsewhere.

I'm glad to hear that. I think when I cut off my Earthlink account and the Percy Fic-A-Thon site shut down and moved... well, that made a core of 50 quality fics. People did an amazing job on the Fic-A-Thon challeges. Then I begged some solid writers like James Walkswithwind, Hijja, and Cedar for their Percy fics, so that really helped. Oh. Almost forgot: I haven't asked Copperbadge yet. He's got a great Percy/Oliver, very masculine and hot.

with the exception of people's lack of commenting

That is a problem but it's not the readers' fault. The system is set up so you have to be logged in to leave a review. It's a real pain. I don't know enough about eFiction to solve it yet.

Icarus

[sarcastic-irony.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I often want to leave a review, but then I have to sign in, then find the story again, and then remember what I was gushing about a moment before. And my admiration cools, which makes for less awesome reveiws.